31 March 2018 5:00 AM

Saturday PS: Good times, bad times

A rough sketch of the economic history of this country during the last 40-odd years would comprise two parts. The first, the 25 years from the Tories’ second election victory, in 1983, up to the financial crisis of 2008 saw the good times roll. The ten years since have seen stagnant or falling living standards with only very recently any end in sight.

As sketches go, it is not a bad starting point. Just as the energy crisis of 1973 ended a 25-year upswing and ushered in ten years of economic crisis, so have the credit crunch and subsequent Great Recession in our own time.

At this point, it is usual for someone to assert that things are not currently as bad as some people seem to think and that the misery data are skewed in some way. During the 2008-2013 period of falling real wages, one suggestion was that earnings had held up provided you counted only those people who remained in the same jobs as before, because those pushed out into lower-paying positions distorted the figures.

Another suggestion proposed the opposite, that earnings had risen for those with the get-and-and-go to switch jobs, thus it was the stick-in-the-muds who stayed put who had seen their post-inflation pay decline.

My interest is elsewhere, in shining a light on the underbelly of the boom years. No, not by reminding one and all of the 1990-1991 recession, with its house repossessions and failed businesses, or even of pointing out that the 1983 election may have marked a turning point for some, but that unemployment continued to climb for another three years.

Rather, I’m interested in solid pieces of evidence that suggest economic dysfunction continued during those boom years.

Here’s one. In 1995, I learned that one of our major banks, having just branched out into offering life-assurance and other personal-finance products, needed a fleet of company cars for the use of its salesforce. So deep a discount was the bank able to demand from the car company in question that, at the end of three years of intensive on-the-road use, the bank was able to sell the cars, second hand, at a profit on the original price.

Yes, demand for cars was so sluggish – or supply so glutted – that the manufacturer was practically giving them away.

Here is another. At the same time, a mortgage broker, to stimulate demand, offered a Rover car to anyone switching a variable loan of £100,000 or more. It was reminiscent of the grain elevator in the US during the Great Depression, where prices fell to zero and then went negative as farmers were paying to get rid of their grain rather than being paid for it.

Nor was the labour market always as healthy as supposed. Lunching with a close friend and her boss, whom I knew separately, he rounded off a very pleasant meal with the greatest compliment available. She was, he declared, totally wasted in her present role.

Almost identical words were used to me at about the same time by a well-wisher at the paper that I was leaving. Making better use of either of us didn’t seem to cross anyone’s mind.

Finally, my future wife and I, chatting to some young people in a pub a couple of years earlier, became aware that, for them, the gauge of employment success was not getting an actual job but the number of interviews they had been granted.

Goodbye, old friend

FOR me, the period I am talking about, the Nineties, was spent entirely at The Guardian (January 1990-June 2000). Obviously, I had friends on other papers but was particularly in tune with those working for The Daily Telegraph. Our respective titles, we agreed, stood by their principles and world views, unlike some we could mention. To our own selves we were true.

Imagine my sadness over the last few years as The Guardian, presumably in pursuit of people who will never read the paper, has been filled with calls for lower business taxes, tougher prison sentences and a huge increase in the defence budget.

Only kidding. It is not the Grauniad that has adulterated its brand but the Telegraph, a process that reached some sort of new low on Wednesday. First up, on the coveted opinion page facing the leaders, we had “Linda Woodhead, professor of the sociology of religion” under the headline: “The Crucifixion was a form of sexual abuse.”

The death and resurrection of Jesus, apparently, was all of a piece with Jimmy Savile, the spoilt-actress “movement” MeToo and parents smacking their children.

No, me neither.

If possible, worse was to follow on the features pages, boasting not one but two separate articles on the very real need for fathers to be deeply involved in their children’s upbringing. I have invented an acronym, OHOF – ostentatiously hands-on father. It’s useful because it sounds a bit like what you would like to tell them to do.

Final beef: on the leader page, we learn that members of the fire brigade were kept “500m away” from the scene of the Manchester Arena bombing last year. Five hundred miles! Where were they - Rotterdam? Stavanger?

Silly me. The paper’s gone metric, presumably to get down with the kids. Sorry, I’m not spending the best part of £2 a day for stuff I can read for free on the BBC website. If I want to.

Which I mostly don’t.

Miscellany on Saturday

APPARENTLY the recently concluded (with not-guilty verdicts) rugby rape trial was, according to one reporter, the most difficult ever court case heard in Northern Ireland. You know, I somehow doubt that, given the region’s history. Not that this stopped an (unquantified but allegedly large) number of attendees across Ireland turning out for "I Believe Her" demonstrations after the verdict. Guess what? I don't. I believe the jury, those who were actually in court. Next time a minority-ethnic defendant is cleared of mugging a white man, I'm going to organise "I Believe Him" marches. Doubtless the police will take the same benign attitude as they did with the rugby case. No, I don't think so either.

Four glorious days in which I need go nowhere near Southern Railway. It is hard to figure out which is the more annoying aspect of this useless organisation – its inability to run a decent train service or its employees’ self-reinvention as anti-terror vigilantes. It cannot be long before their tough-guy “we’ll sort it” announcements give way to “do you feel lucky, punk?”

Not to be outdone, British Transport Police have stuck up a load of posters, of dubious grammatical accuracy, declaring: “We stand together. Tackling hate crime.” Not sure about that full stop in the middle, fellas. Anyway, count me out standing-together wise. As far as I am concerned, “hate crime” has two definitions. One is an actual, physical crime that is deemed more serious than an identical offence because the former is committed against a member of one of the British State’s “protected groups” and the latter is not, while the other is simply the expression of opinions of which the State disapproves.

A new contributor has joined Private Eye’s hilarious feature: “From The Message Boards”. Each week, “Bogbrush” kicks off an on-line topical discussion, signing off after an exchange of usually semi-literate rubbish with: “Great stuff guys!” The new arrival uses the on-line identity “Comedy4Progress” and is a brilliant send-up of the sort of humourless, ideologically-sound female comedians the BBC and others are so keen to force on the rest of us. Her aim is to move comedy beyond “the ‘jokes’ and ‘laughs’ of your 1950s white male mindset”. In terms of avoiding jokes and laughs, I have no doubt she will be entirely successful.

Finally, I meant, during last week’s reflections on stock-market strategies to mention the late Robert Beckman, who died in 2007, one-time investment guru for LBC radio. Although he went a little strange later in life (think conspiracy theories) Beckman’s slot was compelling listening – we both lived in the Barbican for a while and I’d occasionally spot him in a local Italian restaurant. His oft-repeated cautionary adage was: “Markets will do whatever they have to do to ensure that most investors are mostly wrong most of the time.”